How Rue La La Uses Data to Deliver Style Daily

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According to Ari Amiri, software engineer at Rue La La, the fastest way to get someone to buy something is to know what they want to buy, and then, show them what they want to buy … sounds simple enough, right? Not if you don’t have the right technology stack.

Rue La La, an e-commerce website that sells mid- to high-end luxury products with a flash sale model, used to operate like a traditional retail outlet even though they only existed online: the site was largely static, emulating a brick-and-mortar store, where the user experience was the same for everyone.

But they had bigger ambitions to drive a next-generation e-commerce platform – they wanted to provide their members with a personalized experience that was tailored to them and their interests. And this was something that couldn’t easily be done by jumping over schemas and tables in a database.

They turned to Elasticsearch, which has since turned into a strategic component of their business, allowing them easily search through all the products in their inventory, build category navigation on their site by utilizing aggregations, drive personalization through segmentation weighting, and more.